Episode 54: Transcript
"Sarah Lyman Kravits adapted to a decade of grief by yielding to its unpredictability."
Doug French: I was having a fun time interacting with trolls, of all things. I haven't done this in a very long time.
Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Trolls?
Doug: It came through MLive because MLive came to town to cover what we had in front of City Hall on Friday, which was a die-in. We lay down with our bikes in front of City Hall saying, “Look, guys, you began budgeting for zero deaths among pedestrians and cyclists 10 years ago. And last year somehow was our worst year yet.”
Magda: Okay.
Doug: Anyway, so MLive covered it and they posted it on Instagram. And just a bunch of jerks are like, “What a bunch of crybabies. They don't follow the road rules.”
Magda: “They don't want to get killed. What a bunch of douchebags, right?”
Doug: But I love engaging with trolls because I'm really good at high-roading them and just saying, “Oh, has that been your experience? What laws have you seen broken? Let's dig deeper into your knee-jerk trollism and let's have a conversation about what you're concerned about.” And three of them deleted their comments. They just fold like paper. They're just name-calling twits.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: That's the theme though, right? There's just really sanctimonious, forceful arguments based on nothing. Just like the woman who finally said, “Look, that wasn't the Last Supper at the Opening Ceremonies, you dummy.”
Magda: Well, and there's a guy who's, I don't think he's a pastor, I think he's a musician at a Lutheran church. He posted, “Is it possible that Da Vinci's Last Supper itself was modeled after Bacchanalia?” Yeah.
Doug: Which precedes it by several centuries. Yeah. Well, that's kind of where we are now. Yeah.
Magda: Okay, now I got to tell you, I have caught Olympic fever, as I always do.
Doug: Oh, me too. And I tell you, I'll interject real quick because I hope you have watched Celine Dion's performance a thousand times like I have and bawled every time.
Magda: A thousand times, no. I mean, I'm not the biggest Celine Dion fan. I appreciate her talent and the amount of work that she puts into it. I'm very rarely moved by Celine Dion. Even when she sings Jim Steinman songs, I don't feel like they're as moving to me as when Meatloaf performs them, right? But, okay, you were really struck by her performance of that song, which was, what was it, like, “All the Love in the World”? Was that the translation?
Doug: Well, it's Edith Piaf. It's Le Hymne d'Amour, Love’s Hymn. And it's about reuniting with someone beyond the grave.
Magda: Oh, God. Okay, see, that's bad. Yeah.
Doug: The last line is, “God reunites those who love each other.” And she's singing to her dead husband. You can tell she's just still, will never recover from that and has said so. I mean, it was beautiful on its own, but the messaging is just, just knocked me off the couch. So anyway, Olympics fever.
Magda: Well, I've been watching the actual sports.
Doug: Sure, me too. Peacock has got a good hub working.
Magda: Peacock really does. And what I like about it is that you can watch the live start-to-finish of any event you want because they've got a gazillion channels you can see all at the same time. So I've been going all in on surfing.
Doug: I was watching that too, but you spend like 20 minutes waiting for a wave. I don't understand how that's compelling.
Magda: That's what I think is cool about it. So one of my best friends, her kids were on the surfing team in high school. They live in California. And so she was explaining the rules to me. And it's like for a match, they send two or three surfers out and they just hang out in the water with their boards. And it's the two best waves that they surf in a half hour period. And I kind of like that. It's almost like gardening, right? Like you can do your best, but then the rest is out of your control.
That's sort of the way this is, too. Also Tahiti. Oh my God, it's gorgeous. First of all, I didn't realize that surfing was an Olympic event. I seem to have missed it every previous year. And so when I saw that surfing was happening, I was like, where are they surfing? It turns out that France put up four locations as potential sites. Three of them were in France and then this one was in Tahiti, but I guess they wanted to like sort of spread it out so that you could see the beauty of France's “colonies,” too, which, ugh, that's a little weird.
Doug: They considered a wave pool at Euro Disney.
Magda: Um, okay.
Doug: So how would you describe this episode with Sarah?
Magda: Poignant, I think. I mean, she's been through a whole lot. And I think her story is of somebody who always felt lucky. And then things happened that were really tragic. And she's had to not just survive those things, but kind of piece together a new sense of self. You know, if you're lucky, but bad things happen to you, what does that mean?
Doug: I wasn't sure what it was going to be. I just knew her story was amazing just because I've known her for a long time and I've known her as a real bright bulb. And that's what radiated outward. And to see her go through cancer and then losing her only sibling in a car crash, it's an inspiration to me just because even though it's been a real shift in her overall worldview, she hasn't lost that radiance. She still has that light. It's refracted a bit given what she's been through but she's not given up. You know, I think a lesser person could have just recoiled fetally under a comforter and that's not her.
And you know they considered a wave pool at Euro Disney.
Magda: I don't think that's funny.
Doug: Well, the funny part is I can edit this to make it look like you laughed at it!
Magda: Yes, you can.
<music>
Sarah Lyman Kravits: Cool, you learn something new every day.
Doug: Wow, you set me up so perfectly. Guess what I learned today?
Sarah: What did you learn today, Doug?
Doug: You know, I was hoping someone would ask me that. I learned that I share a birthday with Johnny Appleseed.
Sarah: The actual dude?
Doug: The actual guy, Chapman.
Sarah: Wow.
Doug: He was actually a known benefactor and nurseryman, as they call him.
Magda: Nurseryman. Okay.
Doug: Now, I thought at the time the coolest people I shared a birthday with were Serena Williams.
Sarah: Very cool.
Doug: And Olivia Newton-John.
Sarah: Also very cool.
Magda: I share a birthday with Johnny Cash. So, like, you can stop your story right now because Johnny Appleseed, not as cool as Johnny Cash.
Doug: I'm glad you know that because I was doing a little research. I was going under the very plausible idea that neither of you cared anything about this.
Sarah: I'm a fan of both of those.
Magda: Birthdays are special, unlike anagrams.
Doug: Anagrams are special, too. And we're going to leave that there.
Magda: Therefore, I care about my birthday and who shares a birthday with me.
Doug: For Sarah's benefit, we're not going to get into this rabbit hole for the moment. In your spare time, have you looked into who shares your birthday, Sarah?
Sarah: You know, I feel like I have, but I guess it hasn't been important enough to me because I don't recall anyone who shares a birthday with me, although I know that my son shares a birthday with Beethoven, which he really likes a lot.
Magda: All right.
7:47
Doug: Well, anyway, so I did a little research just in case you came back at me with blank stares, which I thought was, as I say, eminently possible. But yes, Magda, Johnny Cash for sure, but also Erdogan has your birthday.
Magda: Really? I didn't know that. I must've just been looking on the “who shares your birthday that isn't an asshole” website.
And if that doesn't exist, you're going to make it. No, you're going to have the idea to make it. And then it's going to just, you're going to buy the URL and forget about it.
Magda: Right. Yeah. I was, last week, I was going to make a website that was, “Is Steve Bannon in jail yet?” “Yes.”
Doug: Now, if I remember correctly, Because I actually have a thing for dates. I remember people's birthdays and dates and things. And I recall your birthday is May 4th, correct?
Sarah: That is correct. Well done.
Doug: Which is Star Wars Day.
Sarah: Yes. And actually, that has become the most important thing about my birthday is that I get to wish everyone May the 4th be with you.
Doug: Well, you also share it with Audrey Hepburn.
Sarah: Oh, that's super cool. I love her. What a classy woman.
Doug: Yeah, so I wanted to start off with something that would be, I thought that would be news that would set the mood.
Sarah: Yes, indeed.
Doug: You know, I was going through thinking about all there is to talk about Sarah Lyman Kravitz, and welcome to the episode. And I think the theme that emerged to me was “late in life revelations.”
Sarah: Hmm.
Magda: “Late in life”
Doug: Is that fair?
Sarah: That resonates. Very much so.
Magda: He's skipped you ahead to age 80, Sarah. And he's talking about “late in life.” How about midlife revelation?
Sarah: Well, I guess it depends on your context. I mean, revelations in the scope of my current life at its current length, the revelations have been late. So we could say that.
Magda: Okay.
Sarah: Yeah. Given the health issues you've had, among other things, it is kind of a phenomenon that Sarah and I were contemporaries in college, and yet she's only 37. Just a total prodigy. And I've read a lot of your writing and in many cases reread it over the past couple of days. First of all, what a blogger you would have been if you had decided just to be a blogger type that went to BlogHer every year.
Sarah: You know, I would have enjoyed that had that fit into my life at the time. But there could be later in my late life revelations and it could involve blogging. So who knows?
Doug: Your work has actually appeared in a lot of outlets when you talk about, I think the central theme is grief.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: And not just for your brother, but just the idea of processing loss over the years. We talked to a lot of people on this podcast about that, about how we're really never prepared for it. You can read Being Mortal. You can look at pieces like yours, which link to that great piece that kind of debunks Kubler-Ross. In fact, we could probably start there, right? Because I think one of the great revelations about those five steps of grief is that it's a really neat and tidy way to look at success. I mean, you want to start with the cancer diagnosis because that came first?
Sarah: You know, I mean, I think to provide some context about this, and I know a lot of people have a similar challenge in their lives, is that if you go all the way back to my childhood, my upbringing, my very, very safe and resourced and loving family, I think I grew up with a sense that if you do everything right, then bad things don't happen to you. And that was true for long enough that it seemed reinforced. And I know there is this human tendency, right, to want to impose logic and steps and let's come up with a heuristic, right, to figure this out. And of course, I didn't really think about things outside me so much at that time and think, how do I explain so-and-so who seems to be a really great person and this awful thing happened or whatever. It just didn't really enter my thought process. But I think later on when, for example, I was diagnosed with cancer at 44 with no history of breast cancer in my family, really, I was utterly baffled like how, how does this happen if there aren't clear indications that it could? Like where's the causation here? I just couldn't figure it out at all. And it was in a weird way nice, initially, that I didn't have time to think about it because all I could think about was “how do I beat this?”
Doug: Which you seem to have done, though.
Sarah: I seem to have done that. And, you know, in a weird way, every day I go, oh, it seems today I have also still beaten it, especially with a cancer that doesn't have any pain or physical cue. It's confusing because you think, well, I felt fine before and I had cancer and now I feel fine. So what does that mean? And so you have to kind of thank goodness for therapy.
Work through that whole thing so that every day you don't think, dear God, what kind of cancer do I have today?
Doug: If we do a quick recap. Did you just feel a lump and just went to see what it was?
Sarah: No, it was caught on a standard mammogram. And I started my mammograms a little bit early. At the time, they were recommending 40. I started mine a little bit earlier because of Doug, a mutual friend of ours, who had cancer early, and it made me nervous. And I asked my doctor, could I start at like 37? And he said, that's fine. So I just had standard mammograms. And when I was 43, there was one that they said, hmm. something on there, come back for an ultrasound and then come back in six months. And then it was, oh, it took from February through April for the formal diagnosis to happen, which was really stressful because when you start to think something's happening, you think, well, why aren't we catching it a little more quickly?
Magda: If it had taken them so long to diagnose it, it wasn't like they saw it, were like, we got to get you in there to cut it out tomorrow.
Sarah: Exactly. Exactly. It was not initially looking that large or that aggressive that they put me right into treatment. Until I had an MRI, I think things were a little more chill in terms of what they thought was going to happen. Once I had an MRI, it was only one side, but it looked more widespread, it looked more serious. And ultimately, when I was diagnosed with a biopsy and then went into surgery, they do what's called a sentinel node procedure during the surgery. So they identify the first couple of nodes that the cancer would have gone to if it had spread. They test those while you're under. And then they make a decision at that moment, do we take more lymph nodes or do we not? And they did find cancer in those nodes. So they took the next group of nodes and that's what put me in the chemo-needing category.
Doug: When you came out of that first surgery, that's when the full spectrum of options was laid out for you.
Sarah: Oh, well, yeah, it's interesting because they were telling me they thought probably it's not going to have spread. It's not an aggressive type. Either I had an inkling or I was just protecting myself in case I did need chemo. But I sort of thought, I think it has moved. And my then-husband thought it had not, being hopeful. So I don't remember this, but after I came out of this surgery, he came to tell me, “They found it in your nodes. You're going to need chemo.” And he was devastated and he was worried about telling me. And so he managed to get it out. And he said that I just went, “Yeah, I knew.” It felt very like, “Yep. Okay. What do we do next for me?”
Doug: So the options were chemo or did you consider the mastectomy?
Sarah: There was no other option. There was no other option at that point. Yeah. They were like, you have to have chemo. And because of my age, I also had radiation after. Although I had a break between the four months of chemo and the six weeks of radiation.
Doug: And that's what gave birth to that incredible picture of you.
Sarah: Yes. Yes.
Doug: Which I will link to in the show notes, which defies description. It's just a cranium full of what looked like indigenous tattooing.
16:27
Sarah: Yeah. So Tony Cordoza is the fantastic photographer who did that. And Gina Rivas Velasquez is the makeup artist. And they were working together on a project that they called Contemporary Tribal Markings. And so he's a friend and neighbor where I was living at the time, and various people in the neighborhood were being tapped to be a part of this. And Tony's wife saw me on the blacktop at the elementary school and said, would you be willing to do this? You have so much real estate. And when you're in the middle of chemo and things really suck, you're going to say yes to anything interesting that's going to distract you, be fun, be different. And so I was all over that. So I went there and I nearly fell asleep. It was so relaxing to have someone paint your head. I don't know. Few people have had the experience of someone painting their head, but it was amazing. And I was so grateful to have that experience. And then I went after school to pick up my kids and scared a lot of the children.
Doug: How long did you sit for that?
Sarah: It was probably close to an hour for the makeup and then probably another hour for the photos.
Doug: It just exudes a level of strength. It exudes a level of defiance, which I know you weren't feeling. And I wanted to draw exactly on that. The whole idea of people are just telling you how brave and strong you're being. And you've written about this, how that wasn't quite the feeling you had internally.
Sarah: Yeah. No, it wasn't. And I recall before I had cancer telling other people how brave they were and having them look at me a little cross-eyed and try to take the compliment. And then when I was in it, I realized I don't feel brave and courageous. I just feel like, what is my alternative but to move through this? And I told people that a lot, I said, you know, I hope you don't ever have to be in this, but if you do, I think you'll find that you're just like, okay, well, the next thing to do is this, whatever that day requires of you. And it doesn't feel like a courage at the time.
Magda: I've been thinking about the fact that I don't think anybody ever wants to be told that they're brave or that they're strong, because what it feels like when somebody tells you that is, “I'm going to comment on you, but I'm not actually going to help you.” And I think the urge to tell people that they're brave or that they're strong, like that urge, we think, oh, we're giving them something. But what we're actually doing is like kind of confessing that we don't feel brave or strong. Like we're not sure that we would be able to do what they're doing. When you get the urge to tell someone they're brave or strong, you should think, what is this urge in me? And could I turn that into something that's actually useful for the other person? Like, can I bring you a meal? Could I watch your kids for two hours? Can I buy you a drink? Right? Like, literally almost anything because it's not really about the other person if you want to tell somebody that they're strong and it's not useful to them.
Sarah: What you're saying has a lot of weight. Let me tell you, there were a couple of friends who came over one afternoon and raked all my leaves and I had a big yard with a lot of leaves. Those actions, just let me take a burden off of you somehow, are so much more useful than... I don't want to imply that people INTEND platitudes. I think the intention on its face is positive, but as you're saying, it tends to reflect an agenda within the person. Maybe they feel less than, which of course, the person with cancer doesn't want to feel superior. Doesn't want to feel more courageous than other people and doesn't wish the cancer on other people in order to develop so-called courage. Like, hey, you could come have this and we could all be so strong together. No, no.
Doug: I mean, thanks for the compliment, but I really just love a big tub of mac and cheese.
Sarah: Right. Like, don't put any cayenne in there. Can't do that during chemo.
Doug: Is that true?
20:57
Sarah: Oh, spicy foods are really tough because one of the things that the chemo does is it strongly affects your fast-growing cells. So that's why your hair falls out. That's why it affects the inside of your mouth. People get sores and other issues. In fact, one of the chemo drugs, the administration is very particular. It's a 10-minute push of the drug from a gigantic syringe into the IV. And during those 10 minutes, they would have me chew ice the entire time to keep the inside of my mouth as cold as possible because that helps the cells not die. And it does work.
Magda: Oh, wow. Wow.
Sarah: Well, let me tell you, there's a thing now that I didn't know about then called a cold cap. And there are people who will wear a cold cap during chemo and it prevents their hair from falling out. But I was so cold when getting infusions, I never would have done it. I would have been like, let's just lose the hair and see what happens.
Doug: I would wear a cold cap like all summer long. Magda, I would think given your humidity issues.
Magda: I would wear one all the time.
Doug: Yeah, you would just.
Sarah: Maybe they have them for people not in chemo.
Doug: They've got to be available just retail because they would sell a bunch of them. and I was also taken by another thing you wrote about how this relates to your dramatic training, because when someone comes to you and says, wow, I loved you in this and you didn't feel like you were there. And rather than rob them of the appreciation of your performance whether they mean it or not and this is a whole other rabbit hole about how suddenly people who are afflicted need to take care of the people giving condolences like, oh, don't worry, I'm fine. You know, that's a whole issue we can touch on as well. But let them have their moment, rather than, you know, argue with them or whatever. Just say thank you and leave it at that. And did you find yourself in that position, too, just kind of choosing the path of least resistance after a while?
Sarah: Oh, absolutely. And a shout out there to Bill Graham Sr., my professor at Catholic University, who originally taught me that concept of “don't deny the experience of your audience.” And I actually bring it into my academic coaching work all the time. You don't know what someone is taking away, right? There's often a difference between what is intended and what is received. And we hear about that in all kinds of contexts. So if you impose your view on someone else, you have the potential to take away something that they've received that's useful to them, that really could serve them somehow. So often I would absolutely just stay simple with that kind of response, because there weren't too many situations in which I could get into a deeper discussion of what would be more helpful. I mean, the blog helped me a lot with that. That gave me an opportunity, you know,
to distill all of my experiences and to make more of a statement as to here's something that's more useful to me.
Doug: And that was evident, I thought, just having read all your pieces over the years and watching how in many cases your grief was evolving. And in other cases, like when you talk about the 10th anniversary of Frank's death, it's just always there. It's just one of those things you just, it becomes a part of you and it's just good days and bad.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: So we'll mention now that the next huge life event for you was when your brother Frank was killed by a drunk driver.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: Your only sibling. And when the person being comforted actually needs to comfort the comforters. As a way of just saying, don't worry, I'm fine.
Magda: It's not your job when something's happening to you to make the other person feel better about it. I never even thought about it until you and I were getting divorced, Doug. And I don't know if this happened to you, but it happened to me that I would tell people that we were getting a divorce and people would be, whoa, in their feelings about us getting a divorce. And I shouldn't be the one that has to walk them through their feelings about something that's happening to me. Because, I mean, Sarah, you're divorced also. You know this. It takes a long time to get to the point at which you are able to pull the plug on this. And by the time you are officially getting divorced, like, it's not like you tell people and you're waiting to see how they feel about it, right? Before you make the decision. It's also not like you tell people and you're expecting them to comfort you, right? Like the time to comfort me was when I was in a bad marriage, not when I'm finally getting out.
Sarah: It doesn't match.
Magda: And I'm imagining it's the same thing when you have breast cancer. It's not like you just wake up, suddenly know that you have breast cancer and like tell everyone, you know.
Sarah: Exactly.
Doug: It's like the baby name. You announce the name of your baby. You're not fishing for notes.
26:03
Sarah: No, no. All of these things. Like when you finally tell someone about your divorce happening, about breast cancer diagnosis, about the death of your sibling, whatever it is, there's been a journey. And I mean, even though my, well, my brother's death was four years after my cancer diagnosis. So I kind of barely crawled out of that whole thing before that hit. And that was very sudden. Other things were not as sudden, but still... You have been on a journey and whoever you've just told is at the very beginning of their journey processing that information. And they are often unaware of asking you for support or caring. And there's an instinct, too, to help someone who's feeling badly until you realize, wow, I'm helping you deal with my pain. I get that you have your pain around it. Doug, you may have seen this in one of my blogs, but I refer to the Ring Theory as which I originally read about in the LA Times. And it's so fabulous. And that rule about comfort in, dump out. So there's the person in the middle who is experiencing the trauma, the pain, the loss, whatever it is. Then there's the next very inner circle. Only comfort goes into that middle circle. If you have pain around it, and of course you do, find someone else at your level or even a lower level circle to dump out to so that you are not asking the person who's managing the trauma to take care of your pain around the trauma.
Doug: And that was very skillful, by the way, thank you for mentioning this podcast is supported by Comfort Inn and we told them we'd work their name into the conversation somehow, and Sarah you did wonderfully. Thank you, your check is on its way
Sarah: You’re welcome!
Doug: The whole idea of how when you're receiving comfort and yet it's not, I'm searching for the right word here. It's not negative per se, but it's like, I know what you mean, but you don't get it. You have to vent that somewhere onto a therapist or do something that releases that steam.
Sarah: Or someone who's in your circumstances. And this is where, I mean, I got a ton out of a couple of breast cancer support groups that I got involved with. And I got a ton out of connecting with other people around grief. And just being able to feel like, whatever I say, people will get it. No one really gets anyone's experience 100%. That's just factual. It's unique. So I've sort of amended my language from “I get it” to... “I get some of it. I get a lot of it. I kind of get it. I get aspects of it.” I tend to adjust it because I don't want anyone to think that I presume to really get it. Even other people who've lost a sibling, even if it's quite analogous to my own experience. I've met someone recently who lost a brother in a drunk driving accident, a younger brother. There's so many analogous points, but still that person's experience is not matching to mine. So I don't want to be presumptuous, but I know that I find comfort and others find comfort in at least identifying what's in the middle of the Venn diagram, right, that you have in common. Like, whew, I can say this. This person understands. They won't take it the wrong way. They can offer me the kind of comfort that really works for me.
Magda: Sometimes just knowing that you're normal, because a lot of these really intense experiences, you have feelings and experiences that nobody ever talks about. And so you don't have any idea that they are normal. When my uncle died in 2016, the whole experience was so intense and so stressful. For months afterwards, I had these physical pains in my body. Like I thought I was dying. Because I just had these weird, random physical pains. And I had never heard of anybody, I didn't think that was part of grief. Like I started reading up on grief, like, am I ever going to feel like a normal person again? That kind of stuff, right? And nobody talks about the physical pains. And then I mentioned it to somebody who had been through the loss of a loved one. And they were like, yeah, I had these pains all over my body.
Sarah: Oh, yes.
Magda: And nobody had ever said that before. Nobody talked about that. When Doug had his heart attack and I moved in for two and a half weeks so I could drive him and the kids around at the same time, somebody said to me.
Doug: You moved in to drive him crazy.
30:47
Magda: Right, exactly. Well, somebody said to me, just so you know, it's kind of a common thing when someone has had a heart attack and come out of it, about a week later, they just get really angry and resentful for like a month. And I was like, okay. And then like a week later I was there in his house trying to take care of him, and he was really angry at me. And I was like, Oh, Hey, here it is right on time. Thankfully, Doug French is normal. This is a good sign. Like that's not how I received it.
Doug: Wow. I hope this is recording. And for the record, I don't recall being angry at you. I'm sure that's your experience.
Magda: No. Well, and I mean that people had said that, too. They said, a heart attack is kind of an out-of-body experience, it takes a while for you to come back, and part of it is just you know you have all these experiences with your physical body that affect your mood and stuff. When you are pregnant, when you have a child, stuff like that, the whole thing about your hormones dropping on day three and day 10 and you're crying and then you're laughing and then you're crying and then you're laughing. Like, I don't remember it. I know I went through it twice, but I don't remember it.
Sarah: No. I mean, the close association of the mind and the body, I don't know why for such a long time we were trying to separate those things. They are so intrinsically linked and there are things that happen. And like you said, Magda, if it can be normalized, if someone's telling you, oh, this tends to happen, if you read about it in a blog somewhere or a book, you think, oh, well, if it's being written about and talked about, it must be pretty common. And it helps you face it with a little more grace and just to think, okay, well, other people experience this so maybe that gives me more of a chance of getting through it, or maybe there's some advice about what I can do, or. As opposed to “this is a nightmare that I can't deal with.”
Doug: Did you have pains after Frank died?
Sarah: Oh, my whole system went haywire. I wouldn't say it was like distinct pains in locations, but I also, like, couldn't eat. And that never happens. That's how I know something's really, really bad. People will say, oh, you know, I'm so stressed. I can't eat. I'm like, no, no, no. I have the opposite reaction, but I literally could barely eat. I just felt in a fog. I just physically, my energy was... It was low. It was buzzy. It was, I don't know, like I just felt like a completely different person. Like the whole thing was an out-of-body experience for months. I kind of felt like this is someone else's life and someone else's story in a paper. And usually I'm the one saying, “oh, that poor family” and reading about it. But it's like, well, now we're the poor family. So how does this square? There wasn't a division between the mental/emotional aspects of it and the physical. It was all twisted up.
Doug: Well, the reason I ask that is if I had lost someone that soon after my heart attack and physical pain started manifesting themselves, I would think, okay, is this something, is this a reaction to the grief I'm feeling now? Or is this pertained to...the heart event I had, because that was full of also horrendous pain when it hit.
Sarah: Yes.
Doug: When you do cardiac therapy, as I did with a bunch of 70 and 80 year olds who thought I was the cutest thing going at 48.
Sarah: You youngster.
Doug: Yeah. I remember my favorite guy was like, “Yeah, this is number five. They should give me a punch card.” You talk about gallows humor in the face of a near death experience. So was there any level of separation that you had? Like, is this cancer coming back or is this grief or did you, seek help into determining if there was something particular that you had to differentiate in terms of its source.
Sarah: That is an interesting question. And, you know, I didn't think about cancer at all during the first, say, year. It was so all-encompassing, that loss. And it was and still is by far the worst thing that has happened to me. I think there wasn't even space to think about cancer at all. I think maybe after the first year or two, I began to worry about stress since stress is pretty closely linked to cancer in a lot of instances, not that it necessarily directly causes it, but that it can increase inflammation, which can create a happier environment for cancer cells should they be floating around in your body. So I did start to worry about the level of stress I was under and if that was going to make me more likely to have a recurrence. And I became very focused on doing what I can, controlling what I can, mainly around exercise and food, just to say, hey, I'm putting up whatever barriers and protections I can. I can't always control the stress, but I can try to bring the level down.
Doug: And you can buy like a bunch of 20-pound bags of ice.
Sarah: Exactly. Put a lot of ice. Do an ice bath. Never done that. Never done that.
Doug: Oh, yeah. Those ice plunges. I did one and I will go back.
Magda: It's supposed to be amazing, though.
Sarah: It is. It's supposed to be so healthy. And the idea of being that cold for more than like three seconds. Oooohhh!
Doug: I think it's one of those things where the fear, you can't dispel the fear until you do it.
Sarah: That is true.
Doug: Just any level of cryotherapy. I agree. It just comes across as so painful and it's such a blow to the system that you could never possibly enjoy it. And then you walk out and you're just, okay. I mean, even the Romans had it right with the frigidariums and the caldariums and the tepidariums. I mean, they figured this out thousands of years ago. So, you know, I don't think it's all that different.
Sarah: I didn't know we had all those ariums.
Doug: Oh, man, they were swimming in ariums. Literally, swimming in ariums.
Sarah: Swimming in ariums. I would be willing to try a cold plunge, like a real ice bath, just to see how I feel after because that's what people talk about, the feeling after of clarity and high-level athletes talk about how helpful it is to their muscles.
Doug: You might just clean your whole house.
Magda: Do either of you guys follow Wim Hof?
Sarah: No.
Magda: Okay. Wim Hof, he's a Dutch, I think he was an Olympic swimmer or something like that. He's probably like 65 now. He has this method for like being super-healthy. And I think he thinks he's going to live to like 150 and stuff. And he's got two pillars to his long life plan. And one is this special kind of breathing that he does. And then the other one is the cold baths. He has these YouTube videos that are just him talking you through the breathing. The breathing's actually kind of cool. It's like, you know, you lie in your bed and you put him on and he's like, “Hello, this is Wim Hof. I'm going to talk you through the breathing now.” And it's like...
Doug: “I am your father.”
Magda: It's like if Arnold Schwarzenegger was reading a script written by Marianne Williamson, sort of. It's vagus nerve stimulation is what it is, right? If you know any about breathing, it's just his specific technique. I did it for a long time, every day and it was very, very calming.
Sarah: Wow.
Magda: But then I felt like I needed to go to the next step and start doing the cold baths. And I was like, oh, can't do it.
Doug: There's a bunch of people around here who just go up to Lake Superior and swim for the therapy of it. They have cryotherapy here. You can just go in Lake Superior for free or you can do it for $120 an hour in some place in Ann Arbor.
Sarah: You can do a polar bear plunge on New Year's Day, which I know a lot of people do at Coney Island. I have friends who do that. I have never done that, but they love it. I mean, they dread it and love it.
Doug: That's just for the content. That's just Instagram for them.
Magda: There's that 5K at midnight on New Year's Eve in Central Park called the Emerald Nuts 5K, which I think is really funny.
Sarah: Just awesome.
Magda: Hey, my testicles are turning colors too, but they're not giving me top billing. And I always thought like that would be the best way to ring in the new year, right? Because it's like a cold plunge and a 5K at the same time, kind of.
Sarah: I like that.
Magda: Just because you're in the air.
Sarah: I think honestly, anything that brings you into the present, like gets you out of your monkey mind, gets you out of all the input and just centers you. I feel like cold plunge would be doing that. I feel like the breathing does that. I feel like one thing that I actually do in my day-to-day life, I will just do a plank for as long as I can hold it if I'm getting scrambled in the brain because I can't pay attention to anything but the pain of trying to hold a plank for up to two minutes. And it is so refreshing to do that. And that I think is one of the things that helps with stress the most. I find that to be true when I go running, certain types of yoga, whatever just shuts my brain off.
Doug: And when we get back to connecting these two events, which are connected only in the fact that they both happened to you, but they had very different impacts on you. What did you learn from the cancer experience that you fell back on when you were processing Frank's death?
Sarah: You know, one of the most important things that was a takeaway from the cancer experience that I used processing my brother's death would be distancing myself from the idea that the way I live causes things to happen in a certain way, which is what I was referring to before, that kind of came from my upbringing and this sense of how things should be if you live a certain way, how you should be rewarded, right? I remember my father telling me that some friend of theirs wrote them a letter after my brother died. And in the letter, they said, “Before this happened and before Sarah got cancer, we thought the Lyman family was charmed.”
Doug: Wow.
Magda: Wow.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: That's my turn to say wow. Yeah. You're normally the wow girl, but I am now wowing.
Sarah: And I think we thought so, too. I think we thought, well, stuff like this doesn't happen to us because we show up in the world and we do good and yada, yada, yada. So the cancer helped me really start to say, I didn't bring this on myself. I didn't cause this. This is something that happened. How can I manage it? And what can I take away from it? Because here it is. It's a fact. What can I take away from it? And I do not ascribe to the “everything happens for a reason.” I don't judge anyone who feels that that serves them. It does not serve me at all. And first of all, simply the fact that I got through something that was unexpected, difficult, very traumatic, and got to the other side of it was something that prepared me. Didn't want to be prepared to lose my brother in this way, but it did prepare me. And that shift in thinking helped me as well to look at this as a circumstantial, awful thing that is a fact of my life now that I need to find a way to integrate, so that it is part of me but doesn't define me, so that I learn from it but it doesn't destroy me.
Doug: Wow, am I relating to so many things that you and I should have talked about many, many years ago.
Sarah: When we didn't know to talk about them because.
Doug: Well, exactly. When we just took things as written, like, okay, this is the way it is and let's just go with it.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: That's actually a great point to lead to the names you chose for your blogs. Because for a time there, when you were in your complete fuck cancer mode, the blog was “No Defeat, Baby, No Surrender.” But what I'm really intrigued by, which I think brings this all together, is “Life Without Judgment.” Where does the judgment come in in terms of the gap between where you saw yourself in the world and where you really are? And what is that journey for you now?
Sarah: I think what led me to that name was realizing how toxic judgment was. Self-judgment, judgment of others. And I started to see that with the cancer experience in seeing how people would judge themselves for how they had lived. “Maybe I ate too much sugar. Is that why I have cancer?” “Maybe I was under too much stress. I didn't handle it.” That self-judgment or the judgment of others. It's a funny thing that happens when you have cancer. People get curious about the why in part because of fear and a hope that whatever the why is for that person is not a factor in their lives. And that's just human. If someone gets lung cancer, everyone says, oh, well, did they smoke and did this or that? Because if there's a clear answer and they're not a smoker, then that helps them say, okay, I'm not in danger. But judgment of self, judgment of others, all I saw were negative results to that. And so in managing grief, I also saw how there is judgment within the grief community about how people are grieving, about the type of loss. Oh, is this loss, quote unquote, “easier” than some other loss? Is a sudden loss, quote unquote, “worse” than one when someone has a long illness? Why are we judging levels on these things? Who wants to win the grief Olympics? Sorry, I don't want a medal for that. I came around to that central concept of life without judgment. Just take it out as an umbrella for dealing with any kind of trauma. Like if you can separate yourself from the judgment you may have, if you can separate yourself from the judgments you may feel from outside and just look at it on its face, what's going on? What do I have control over? What can I learn from this? How can I make choices that move me forward with this experience as part of who I am? And the leaving judgment out of it just proved over and over again to be the central ingredient.
Sarah: Do you have to remind yourself? Do you catch yourself judging people just out of muscle memory?
Sarah: Oh, sure!
Doug: Or is that moving out of your system?
Sarah: Sure, I do. But because this is so much a part of who I am, I take it apart. And this is so important for my work coaching students because students come to you from every situation you could possibly imagine. And the last thing in the world they need is for someone to sit in judgment of where they are. And the way for them to benefit from a coaching session and from you being able to ask them questions is for them to feel comfortable laying the authentic situation on the table, whatever that is, and know that they're not going to hear, well, why did you do that? If you step back and say, I have no judgment of this person, we're going to unpack the situation and see how they would identify why they made these choices, how they would identify different ways to do it, how likely they think they are to try a different way. All sorts of possibilities come online if you can set the judgment aside.
Magda: I mean, I was just thinking that it's like such an interesting concept to be talking to kids because they really still are kids even if they're 22 years old, right, you know your frontal lobe doesn't fully form until you're 25 and that explains a whole lot. And to know that part of the problem that they have made these poor decisions is that they probably have gotten a lot of “Why did I do this?” in the past, and that that's their inner voice at this point. And that you can help change their inner voice so that it's not waiting for them to fuck up and then recriminating them, but instead giving them just a little bit of space before the decision. Because I feel like it's that space that kids don't have modeling for anymore.
Sarah: No, they don't. And that space, that's where the possibility is. And you're right. They have internalized all of this messaging from their family or from high school or from systemic racism or the whole idea of stereotype threat that we internalize whatever the messaging is about a group to which we belong, and then we find that affecting how we operate. And to give them that space and ask them, “what's the narrative in your head?”
Doug: That's the interesting point, too. And I'm going to shake my fist at the cloud for a moment as an older gentleman. But you could say, “Why did you do that??” Or you could say, “let's talk about why you did that.” But since a younger generation is losing track of the nuance of expressing thought because it's all text, and I will hate texting until the day I die, there are so many different ways to interpret a text that's offered in such a context-free way.
Sarah: Right.
Doug: That you're going to impose your own judgment, your own lens on the words you're receiving, irrespective of how they may have been meant.
Sarah: Back to that point, exactly. That what's received is not necessarily what's intended. And in fact, coaches tend to avoid the word “why” for that reason, because it's very hard for people not to feel judged, which of course reflects often inner judgment.
Doug: It's so easy to reinforce that.
Sarah: It's so easy to reinforce that, even without the tone. So you say something like, what causes would you identify?
Doug: Given what you've been trained in and given what you've learned, how do you counsel people not to judge themselves? And to what extent does that fall back on healing yourself in the same time?
Sarah: Well, from a coaching perspective, what you do is you target your questions toward the person unpacking their own narrative. So you don't, at least in a coaching setup, you don't offer guidance per se, but you just keep asking questions. If they identify a self-perception as part of the cause of not doing well on an exam, then you would say, “where do you think that comes from? How true do you think that is? Tell me about when that wasn't true for you. How might that help dispute your narrative?” Ultimately, it's not a quick process and it's something that they have to do on their own. But to open up that possibility can help them at least begin to see the effect. So that helps them move away from just purely saying, I don't have the ability. I don't have the strength. I don't have what it takes. And to say, well, maybe I do have what it takes, but here's a bunch of obstacles or barriers that I need to address.
Doug: And this, by the way, as a public service announcement, is a good way to distinguish a good therapist from a crap therapist. I've had both. And the crap therapist will just sit there and say, huh, man, that sounds hard. Pay Audrey in the lobby on the way out. But a skilled therapist is going to ask those questions incisively and specifically, introspectively, and get you thinking about, as you say, when did you feel different? And what were the circumstances of that feeling? Why aren't they here now? Or are they? Is there a connection? You know, there's so much there that a skilled therapist, a skilled coach, a skilled anyone can challenge you in that way.
Magda: Well, can we make a distinction between therapy and coaching? Because they're not at all the same.
51:17
Doug: Because you're one and not the other, but they're related, sure.
Magda: They're related, but they also take different formats, and one's licensed, and you know what I mean? There's stuff that therapists absolutely 100% can't say that coaches can say, and different kinds of coaches say different things and work in different ways, and have a lot more leeway to figure out what are the circumstances of this person and what's going to help them make a plan, whereas therapists are a lot more limited in what they're allowed to do and say to people.
Doug: So if my therapist did ask me those things, should I have her up on charges?
Magda: I don't have any idea. I don't know anything about therapy. I've been in therapy in the past, but I think you're treading into dangerous waters here when you say, oh, Sarah, you're such a great therapist because I don't know if Sarah is a therapist.
Doug: I never said that. No, no, no, no, no. I said she's asking the questions that a therapist should at least have in their mind and should phrase within the limits of the relationship.
Magda: I don't know that a therapist is supposed to ask those questions, is what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it sounds to me like Sarah is a coach that is able to guide the clients into answering a lot of these questions for themselves, right? And like, what more could you want for somebody that age? And I think when I work with people who are older, when I'm doing problem solving and business coaching and stuff like that, sometimes I am just a lot more blunt and say, “What did you think was going to happen? What actually happened? Where's the gap? What do you think you should do next time to try to eliminate that gap,” right? But when you're working with undergrad-age kids, it's often not useful to be that direct because they'll feel like they're being bossed around.
Sarah: You're correct in a lot of cases, and it also depends on the student. And I actually do coach masters and PhD students as well. So I, as a coach, have to adjust my approach depending on the person and also depending on the relationship. At their essence, coaching and therapy do differ, although they use a lot of similar strategies because coaching assumes basic wellness of the student for that moment, for that coaching session, not to say they don't have issues, but it assumes wellness and it focuses on empowering the student to move toward a goal. Versus therapy does not assume wellness in that sense and is more focused on digging into what is the source of ill health.
Doug: Yeah, a patient in crisis has a much different agenda than a person who doesn't know what to do with their lives next.
Sarah: And a coach has to have a strong boundary there. So if I have a student who has mental health issues that are affecting their ability to do their schoolwork or to show up to class or whatever the issue is, I will say, so in our session, we can talk about how these things are affecting your academic performance. In order to deal with those challenges directly, you can contact you know, this office and this person. So, so we do separate that, but there are similarities to empowering that person to explore what's really going on in their head for sure.
Doug: Well, and I'm going to ask this. I think I know the answer because I know you as a push-forward person. You don't have a lot of extra time. You're essentially... We're all jiggling plates.
Magda: Jiggling plates?
Sarah: We're jiggling them. We're juggling them. We're joggling them.
Doug: I could rephrase.
Sarah: No, I think you could use it.
Doug: We're all juggling plates, but you've got the whole wedding china going is what I'm saying.
Sarah: Yes.
Doug: And so, you know, hypotheticals are a luxury, but if you ever have had the time to think about this, given these two big life events that you've been through, would you even be the coach that you are? And assuming that your life path could have taken you that direction anyway, how much more equipped of a coach do you feel you are?
Sarah: I would say that all of my experiences my brother's death, the cancer, the divorce, stuff going on with my kids, et cetera, has all fed into the level of thinker and coach and writer that I am to an enormous degree. Would I trade my extra ability and insight to not have had those traumas in my life? I would. But given that I have them, I'm grateful to have pulled wisdom and skills out of these experiences that I can use to help other people and that I can use to have as good of a life as I can. I think about this sometimes, what you're asking about, and I think, well, if none of these things had happened, I wouldn't know that I could have been that much better. And maybe I would have gotten better in a different way that wouldn't have required so much pain. I don't know. That's a Sliding Doors question, if you're familiar with that movie.
Doug: I obsess on Sliding Doors questions all the time, and I know they don't serve much of a purpose. And my goal is to be too busy to care about them ever again at some point.
Sarah: They're interesting, though. They are interesting. But I do think that I've pulled so much out of this, and if I got it, well, I might as well use it.
Doug: Did you ever watch that conversation with Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert about grief?
Sarah: Oh, yes. Yes.
Doug: And Stephen Colbert said, “I've learned to love the thing I wish had never happened.”
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: And I thought of you when I heard that because I imagine that must have been one of the key things that you've kind of put in your quiver over the years and bonding with your parents as you do because you also have this unique sandwich parent existence. And now that you've moved closer to your parents, to what extent does this feel kind of like shedding of a skin?
Sarah: You know, it's different. It all feels like it's exactly where I need to be right now. It was a tough transition with my last kid graduating high school, selling the house we had all lived in for 19 years, which was truly a home, and moving closer to my parents, starting a full-time job in a different sense that I had been working for most of my life, because I mostly was self-employed and a contractor as a textbook author. But everything definitely feels like this is the right place to be. So I've let go of a lot of responsibilities and taken on a bunch more to just fill in. I don't have to worry about my lawn anymore. So there's that, but I do.
Magda: Are you in a condo now?
Sarah: I am. That's the dream. It's a dream. So there's a lot that I've let go of, but that feels like just the right time to let go of it. And then there's more I'm taking on. Neither of my parents drive anymore. So I help them with things that I haven't helped them with before. I visit them more. I'm grateful for the opportunity also to know them in this moment, and to experience how our relationship is deepening and changing over time, which I don't think that many kids and parents get to do.
Doug: Well, I don't believe that everything happens for a reason either, but I am very glad that you seem to have weathered a lot of this as well as you have, and are very candid about when you haven't weathered it well, and well, you may never. And I think that's, but that's a really important thing to consider. I think when you look at Kubler-Ross, you look at “grief has an end.” And it doesn't. And it's just good days and bad, and it's all individual. And I so relate to the whole idea of growing up in a sense that life has an interior logic to it. And then when life starts defying that logic you start to think, wait a minute, there's another logic that I'm not perceiving, so it's my fault.
Sarah: Right, exactly.
Doug: That's my experience has been. There was a whole other logic that I wasn't brought up in that I don't know about, and therefore I'm not equipped to exist within it.
Sarah: Right, I'm clueless. Because the idea that there might not be a logic doesn't immediately enter into your consciousness. And just to make a point, too, about Kubler-Ross, that whole five stages of grief was originally designed for terminal illness patients themselves. So in that sense, this is why it seems to have sort of a sequence and an end, because for those patients, there is one. And it was misappropriated over time as a way to process grief for those who are remaining alive. And it doesn't work that way. I think it makes a lot more sense for a person who's facing a terminal illness. But for the rest of us, grieving in different ways, and this applies to people grieving other losses that are not a death, you know, people grieving the loss of the idea they had in their head of how their marriage would go, for example, how their life would go in that way. People grieving the loss of who they thought their children would be. Whether it's their profession, whether it's their gender, whatever it is, there's grief in that that's real. It doesn't mean that it's a great idea to impose that on people who don't feel that that change warrants grief, but it's important for people to be able to look at that, honor that for themselves, say, I'm grieving this loss of what I thought was going to be, and then see how can I...
Doug: And that implies judgment, yeah.
Sarah: Yes! Don't should all over yourself, as the saying goes.
Doug: Well, and the five steps always struck me as a marketing decision anyway. You know, like five sounds official.
Sarah: Well, and we love that. We love like nice little packaged, you know, aphorisms and plans and acronyms and whatnot. It just feels so, “oh, we've got it figured out.” Except for, oops, we don't.
Magda: Well, and Kubler-Ross, like, I mean, she came up with that at a time when people thought that people grieved and it was all the same and then people stopped grieving. Right. And so just to say like there are different qualities, like maybe all she was really trying to say was “the story's different every day.”
Sarah: Yeah.
Magda: And she just had to wrap it up in five steps because otherwise people weren't going to take her seriously. You don't even know where the horizon is for the first year. And you really are not in any way, shape, or form able to really function as you functioned before until you pass the three-year mark. But other than that, I think every day is different.
Doug: I'm so grateful you came on just to talk about all this. I know you don't get the chance to talk about it very often, but when you do write this book, what will the pitch be?
Sarah: Oh, gosh. Yeah, that kind of goes back and forth in my mind a lot. But it always comes back to letting go of the judgment of yourself, letting go of the idea of the should. I should do this. I should be this. I should have done. And being with what is, and finding what's valuable and knowing that you have choices moving forward and don't judge your choices. Let go of the exterior shoulds, let go of the interior shoulds, and ask “what serves me in this moment?”. And trust that there are answers that will come to you, even if it takes a little time. Because I will say it took me many years to really know how to listen to my intuition until it really smacked me around. Growing more friendly, more companionable with your intuition is a really important part of letting go of judgment.
Doug: That resonates with me a lot just because in families like yours and mine that got in line for thirds for shoulds.
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: I feel there's a real contrast between the shoulds I was raised with and the shoulds that govern my life now. And I think part of that is because there were so many at the outset.
Sarah: So many. And also from what we saw at the time, they all worked. So we were looking at that as proof of causation, right?
Doug: Confirmation bias is a bitch.
Sarah: Yeah. I want to say to both of you too, that I really am grateful myself for the opportunity to talk about this and to talk with both of you and to be a part of the conversation that you all are putting out into the world and to help inspire people to think, it's really important. So thank you.
Doug: I appreciate that. I'm glad you think so.
Magda: Thank you for coming on!
Doug: And before we go, I wanted to ask if you are still blogging, if you're writing anything that you're doing online where we could find you, find your writing, past and present, and people who want to follow you and find out when the book deal comes, where do we find you online?
Sarah: Well, I will always be findable at lifewithoutjudgment.com. I wrote very frequently on there for a while, and then it became more sporadic as other life situations took a lot more energy. I anticipate I'll be writing more on that as time goes on, and that's going to be my anchor point for sure.
Doug: Well, it's a total surprise given how busy your life is that you're not spending hours a day dicking around on social media.
Sarah: I do spend minutes a day, but I literally have to shut it down. I mean, boy, five minutes on Facebook and I just want to just congratulate everybody and offer condolences to everybody and get in touch with everybody because I feel everybody's stuff. And then I have to say, nope, we're going to close it. And yeah, we're going to move on over to Google Keep for the next thing I need to accomplish today.
Doug: And thank you for listening to episode 54 of When the Flames Go Up with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Sarah Lyman Kravitz, author of the Life Without Judgment blog and many other things that you're going to read about in the near future. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles, LLC, and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode, which comes out every Wednesday, and our bi-weekly newsletter, Friday Flames. Whether bi-weekly means twice a week or once every two weeks is up for you to interpret. We'll see you next week for episode 55. Until then, have a great week. Bye-bye.
Sarah: People always confuse that thing with the biweekly and the semiweekly.
Doug: Why didn't we just record our marriage like this?
Magda: Oh, my God. Can you imagine?
Sarah: No, honestly, you guys...
Doug: “Please read back the tape, please.”
Sarah: I think this is one of the hugest drivers of anxiety and misery and stuff. Like, all the stuff that was said back in the day, like, you know, before a certain year, the stuff that was said, the stuff that was done, the stuff that was written, whatever, it went into the ether. Like all that stuff fades, but when you can watch it and read it on your phone.
Magda: There really is a transcript now.
Sarah: Yes. And it's horrible for that to remain. I think it keeps the pain active for things that we don't want to keep with us. That's not healthy for us to keep. It's awful. I feel for the kids. I'm like, y'all just delete some shit. My God.